The universe we experience is fundamentally an illusion, and our existence is a cosmic accident rather than a designed outcome. Physics reveals that what seems like a finely-tuned universe for our existence is actually the result of random quantum events and accidents in the early universe. The Higgs field, discovered through the Large Hadron Collider, acts as a cosmic superconductor that gives particles their mass, but this field may be unstable and could potentially 'melt' in the far future, ending all existence. This understanding challenges our perception of reality and suggests that the universe is not designed for us, but we are fine-tuned for the universe.
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Pangburn - Lawrence Krauss lecture on Physics & Science
Added:It's so great to see you all again. My name is Travis Penguin and I'm president and CEO of Penguin Philosophy. I started this company because I believe in the inspirational power of art and science.
I hope to one day live in a world where art and science become the key sources of inspiration in people's lives, which when applied will allow them to drop anti-scientific beliefs.
The human race is plagued with anti-science all around the world like believing that the earth is 6,000 years old, climate change denial, and so on.
It is my goal to promote science worldwide to stand in opposition to negative sources of inspiration.
One of my heroes and sources of inspiration is here tonight. Professor Krauss makes big ideas accessible from early universe to general relativity.
Even though these subjects can sometimes leave us perplexed, he communicates in a way that's accessible.
He also really knows how to piss off creationists.
Please welcome to the Chan Center stage, Lawrence Krauss. [applause] Thank you very much.
>> [applause] >> Thank you.
[applause] Thank you very much.
Well, well, thank you. That's it's been a pleasure and I hope you all enjoyed the evening. Um, anyway, thank you. It's really nice to be here. It's such a beautiful night. If if I were you, I'd be outside, but but uh that's the way it is. Um, I tried to be, but they brought me back in so I could talk. Um, anyway, I we'll have a a fun night tonight, I hope. And I I put this up for you to have something to read while I was being introduced. And um it's one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite books. Now, a friend of mine and filmmaker Berner Herzog introduced me to this book and and um it's it's called The Paragan and it's about a paragrin and um but it's a naturalist book and you should it's really a wonderful read.
But the most important thing I I got out of it was this quote which says the hardest thing of all to see is what is what is really there. And that's really more or less the moral if you want of what I'm going to talk about tonight.
The universe we we experience in in many ways is an illusion. And the story of of going underneath that illusion, the surface reality to understand what the universe is really like underneath is in my opinion the greatest story ever told so far as you'll see. Now, if I'm going to tell a story, I should begin with by copying other storytellers. So, I begin with it's the best of times. And and by that, I mean that the Large Hadron Collider is operating and has not yet created a black hole that's destroyed the world. And but it's also the worst of times in many ways. And uh oh, let's forget him for a second. But um the the where I come from, this is the worst of times. And um and and it is bad and and but the great thing about talking about science either the universe or at the fundamental scales is that it takes us away from our petty myopic concerns and uh and and that's what I want to talk about in fact how myopic we really are to think that this guy matters or that we matter in a sense and and that this too shall pass and we too shall pass and the universe won't really care either way. But to to describe that, this is an image that that I want to come back to periodically. And um it's it's uh it's ice ice crystals on a window in the winter time. I I gave a talk on this in in uh in my hometown in in down in Arizona, and I had to explain that these were ice crystals. But uh but so let's say you're looking at a beautiful winter morning and and it's early and it's still cold and there these crystals on the on on the window and um but what I want you to do first is imagine what it would be like to live evolve and have a civilization that that that that emerges on one of these crystals. So pick one anyone say this one here. Okay. What would what would happen on to that civilization? Well, first of all, there'd be one direction which would be very very special. That direction there.
Cuz the forces would be different in that direction and that direction. And physicists would develop laws of physics that would describe the forces in this direction versus that direction and how they were different. Um, religions would emerge and explain why that direction was was set ordained by God to be very special. There'd be wars fought over whether it was that direction or that direction. And and all of that would happen. And of course it would assume some significance that isn't really there.
And what I want to explain to you is how the the universe that we see that seems so in many ways finely tuned to our existence for many people endows our existence with a significance that that also isn't really there. And uh um the the physicists might at some point on this on this crystal come to the realization that that this is an accident. This is an accident of their circumstances and not crystals in other directions can form too. And what's amazing is that we've gotten to that point here as I'll describe. But it's a long story although it'll actually will seem extremely long by the time I'm finished I'm sure. But um I want to go back to in fact the first person who really talked about our universe as an illusion of reality and that's this guy here. often asked who is this guy and and uh and people say Aristotle because he had a better press agent than Plato but that's Plato and uh I I I actually um Plato impressed himself upon me. I I um I grew up in Canada actually and that's why I was educated and uh and and um and [applause] but and I and I was forced to read Plato in high school and I read the Republic and one of the parts of the Republic that that really hit me at the time and since then I've thought about a lot more is a is the allegory of the cave. Um Plato likened our existence to people who were chained in a cave to look at the back wall of the cave and see only shadows of reality. This is actually I got this from my high school textbook uh which I found which shows how old I am because it's no longer copyrighted but uh uh so this is this is the walls of the cave and they imagine people being shaved chained and only being able to see the walls and see the shadows of real things like people walking on a roadway behind them lit by a fire and in fact the real outside was here. The sunlight was up here and they they were be changed and looked at the walls of that cave and that would be their reality just the shadows of reality. And he said the job of the philosopher, mathematician, whatever you want to call it, was to infer from the shadows the true nature of the reality behind. That was the job. And he also said, you know, if if uh if you if if that person was or anyone was dragged out from behind this to out to the sunlight here, the first thing would happen be incredibly painful and then it would sort of be incomprehensible. But after a while, your eyes would adjust and you'd see the outside. You wouldn't want to go back because you'd see the true nature of reality. And if you did go back and talk to these people about what real the real world was really like, they they you'd sound crazy to them. And as a physicist, a particle physicist, I know exactly what that sounds like because we have we've gone so far away from the reality we experience in our studies right now that when we talk about it, it sounds often ridiculous. And to get there is a long it's a series of steps. And I want to take you through those steps. Um, so this is one of by the way, this is everything is is cultural in a way. And this is this picture is cultural. It's characteristic of the time. So, this book was from the 1950s clearly because you notice the people that are chained here are scantly clad women, which is not historically accurate. Um, it had if it had been Plato's time, they would have been little boys. And uh anyway, that one um but okay, but for these people, the reality be different than the reality we experience. For example, the concept of length would have no meaning to them.
They would see objects change length regularly. For example, they one day they would see the say the shadow of a plastic ruler on their wall look like that and then later on in the day it would look like that and they say okay objects change their length regularly.
So length has no meaning. But then the philosopher, mathematician, natural scientist might look at that and say, "No, no, no, no. I actually realize that that in fact length has a meaning." But we're seeing the two-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional world.
And what we're and these projections are different projections of the same object which in three dimensions has a well- definfined length. So looking at it from above, if you look at if the ruler is parallel, if I tall enough, I could stand and do the shadow myself. But if the ruler is parallel, it it produces a shadow that that's long, but that's that long. But if I if I rotate the ruler in the direction perpendicular to the wall, then the light rays come here, and you see a projection of the ruler, which is smaller. And so the mathematician would say really in the underlying three-dimensional world, length has a meaning. But the world is three-dimensional, not two-dimensional.
And people would have a hard time understanding that because everything in their life would have been an experience of two dimensions. And just talking about three dimensions would have would have been difficult. And certainly people couldn't visualize it. You could describe it mathematically.
But this would have the hallmark of all the great developments in in physics at least and for the most part in science that when whenever a great discovery is made, things that on the surface seem very different are then shown to be different manifestations of precisely the same thing. And so this would be an example. This person would show these two different lengths were really different manifestation of the single length. And that would be great progress, great discovery and these people would discover that the world is threedimensional. Well, let me jump ahead now by a bunch of centuries to the to to the people who first allowed us to see the current shadows of reality. And this is one of my favorite physicists of all time, Michael Faraday, the greatest experimental physicist of the 19th century.
He um he was an amazing guy in many ways. He he had no formal education. He was trained as a bookbinders apprentice and uh and he um he created a precedent that I try and tell all my students about. In fact, he um which is to to suck up to your professors. Um so he he went to the lectures of Humphrey Davyy who was the director of the Royal Institution at the time and he attended the lectures and wrote down beautiful lecture notes and then bound them in a beautiful volume which he then presented Tomrey Davyy and and then said can I be your assistant and he and he knew about academic ego even then and and Humphrey Davey made him his assistant and eventually Faraday rose to become director of the Royal Institution and indeed the greatest experimental physicist of his time and he changed everything. He created the modern world we live in in many ways by his experimental discoveries, discoveries associated with electricity and magnetism and it was forefront science at the time. It didn't seem to be useful in any way and there's a many apocryphal stories about that. One of my favorites which is probably apocryphal is involves Gladstone say coming in with the prime minister coming into the laboratory and seeing jumping frogs and wheels and other things and saying what use is any of this something again that I hear a lot and and he and he's reputed to have said several things but my favorite response was he said what use is this why one day you'll tax us for it and and it's and he was right he discovered the laws of electricity and magnetism that make modern civilization possible that make basically everything was going to happen the night possible. Now, Faraday had no formal education and certainly no mathematical training and he said he only wrote down one equation his entire life and so he he thought in pictures as a mental crush to himself and he tried to understand he tried to actually answer a question that Newton had tried to thought about in the context of gravity and never answered. But the idea was when two two electric charges are here and they repel each other, how does this charge know where this charge is to be repelled by? How how does he know that? And and Faraday came up with a with a mental picture that helped him think about that. He said, let's around every charge, let me imagine these things, these lines going out to infinity. I'll call them electric field lines. And then the number of field lines will be proportional to the magnitude of the charge. And I can know where what'll happen when I put a charge here because it'll be pushed in the direction of the field lines. So if I if I put a charge here, it'll be propelled in that direction. If I put it there, it'll be repelled in that direction. And the magnitude of the force will be proportional to how many field lines are in the vicinity. So here there are a lot more field lines there are here. So the force be a lot greater. And it turns out this not only was a good analogy, it was an exact mathematical analogy. It exactly reproduces the electric force between two charges. just this mental crutch. And it's even better if you have many charges, two charges, and just the fact that field lines can't cross. So, they kind of get repelled by each other.
You can imagine something looks like this. And then again here, if I put a positive charge here, it' be repelled.
If I put one there, it' be repelled that direction. If I put it right here, it'd be repelled, but with twice the magnitude of here because there twice as many field lines. And again, it's exact.
It reproduces the algebra exactly, allowing him to get a picture of that electric force. And that was great. Now, that's not what what Faraday is known for. He's known instead for a discovery he made by accident.
Up to that point, it was known that electricity and magnetism, two different forces, had some connection between them clearly. And it had been discovered earlier in the century by uh physicists in France that if I had electric charge and I moved it in a current, then it would produce a magnet. And many of you have played with electromagnets. You have a current loop and and it creates a magnetic field, you make a magnet. So clearly a moving charge could create a magnetic field. The question was, could a magnetic field produce a force in any way on a charge that's just sitting there? Could could it produce an electric force? Could magnets in any way produce an electric force? Clearly electric charges can produce a magnetic force. Could magnets produce electric force? And people tried and Faraday tried. They put magnets near charges and nothing happened. Then one day he was in his laboratory and he had two current loops ready and he had a what is essentially a battery connected to one and he closed the circuit and a current started flowing in that current loop.
And when that current started to flow he noticed a current flowing in this loop spontaneously just started and then stopped. And then when he turned the current off here a current flowed again. And what he discovered by accident was that a changing magnetic field because when the current starts to form here the magnetic field starts at zero and gets bigger. A changing magnetic field produces an electric field a force on a charge. And that changed everything.
It created modern civilization. It's the reason we have electric power now because what you do nowadays in in where I grew up in that part of Canada when Niagara Falls the you have a little current loop and you put it in a around a turbine that rotates and there magnets there and a rotating current loop sees a changing magnetic field. So a current goes in the loop and that produces the power that lights up the cities around it. And it's the same thing here whether you're powered by coal or nuclear or whatever or tar sands ick anyway.
Uh so indeed we get tax for it because it was his matt Faraday's law of induction that produced made possible all of modern civilization. Okay great and he discovered this new relationship between electricity and magnetism. But the first person to really explain that relationship was not Faraday was the greatest theoretical physicist of the 19th century James clerk Maxwell who was also was an amazing guy in his own way.
He was brilliant, a a child prodigy in fact. And uh his story is kind of interesting too because um he's Scottish and he um he had already explained things even as a young man like in fact the rings of Saturn why they might be stable and um he had a professorship in in Glasgow and there was a university that the university he was in merged with another university and they could only have one professor of physics. So who did they get rid of? Well, they got rid of Maxwell and kept it by we don't know anymore. And um and that's typical of academic administration. And um and then the same thing happened to him in Edinburgh and he eventually got sort of exiled down to Cambridge where he developed he codified mathematically and extended the results of Faraday to demonstrate something absolutely remarkable that in fact electricity and magnetism were the same thing that one person's electricity is another person's magnetism. And by fixing up the mathematics that Faraday had discovered, he generated four equations which physics students proudly wear on their t-shirts. It's the four Maxwell's equations and underneath it says, "Let there be light." Because unlike the Bible, that really explains why there's light. And and um and uh and and and form actual equations. not only said let there be light but made this beautiful connection between electricity magnetism and showed that they're really the same thing.
That's what's interesting. Now the implication of that as they say is let there be light. And why is that? Well the most the best calculation you can do as an undergraduate in physics in my opinion is the calculation that Maxwell did. What he showed with his four equations when you write them down properly is that if you take in a laboratory and measure the strength of the electric force between two charges in laboratory and you come over here and you measure the strength of the magnetic force between two magnets and those two numbers and you plug them in to match those equations, you will demonstrate something interesting. He demonstrated that if I take a charge and start shaking it, what happens? Well, I I have a current, okay? And that current will produce a magnetic field here. But if I move it back and forth, the current the magnetic field will be changing. But that changing magnetic field will produce a electric field here. But that electric field here will be changing. So that'll produce a magnetic field. The magnetic field will be changing. I'll produce electric field, magnetic field.
And what I'll do when I shake a charge is I'll produce a disturbance in those electric and magnetic fields. And if I measure the strength of the force between two electric charges and the strength of the force between two magnets and I plug them in the equations, I can actually calculate the speed of that disturbance from fundamental principles. And what did he discover when he calculated the speed of that disturbance? It was the speed that light had been measured to have. And he discovered that light was an electromagnetic wave, a wave of disturbance in electric and magnetic fields. So that unification which was the greatest unification of the 19th century showing that two distinct forces in nature electricity and magnetism were really the same force which we now call electromagnetism had an implication and the implication was light is an electromagnetic wave. And when you think about it, it's remarkable cuz those figments of Faraday's imagination.
Those fields that he invented as mental crutches just to help him understand things were real. They were as real as a hand in front of your face because if it weren't for them, you wouldn't see the hand in front of your face cuz it's light. So, it's amazing that that these things that we think of in our minds and often just help us with pictures sometimes, not always, have an underlying reality that we would never have expected. But again, it's the hallmark of a great development, the greatest development of the 19th century, the unification of electricity and magnetism that often it makes remarkable predictions. In this case, resolving a problem that had been around since well before Newton. What was light? And now we know light is an electromagnetic wave. I in fact I I think I have this picture of of light as an electromagnetic wave in case you needed it moving along. And that was the first great unification of the modern era.
But that made possible something else and due to this guy here and you all recognize this guy Albert Einstein. Now Albert Einstein wouldn't have been Albert well he would have been Albert Einstein but you wouldn't know who he was if it hadn't been for Maxwell and Faraday.
And you know, I get a lot of mail, email every day. Happily email now because it's easier to delete. Um, I get a lot of letters and and and and they they start like this. Everything you think you know is wrong. Okay. Half of them are about my politics and then the other half are about science. And they say, and then this is always almost always the case. and and they check the logic in this, okay? They say, "Everyone thought Einstein was crazy.
Everyone thinks I'm crazy, therefore."
Okay. Anyway, and then I go to hit delete when I read that part because they actually don't understand one of the most important things about science.
They get it wrong. The con the wisdom conventional wisdom is it's developments in science do away with everything that went before them.
And that's by the way one of the people say why should I bother learning science now? Because everything we think is true today tomorrow will be proved to be wrong. So why bother learning it? Okay.
And that's exactly wrong. That's exactly how science doesn't work. What satisfies a test of experiment today will always satisfy the test of experiment.
It will always be true for the things that it works on. Newton's law of gravity has been supplanted at these extremes of scale by general relativity and small scales by quantum mechanics.
But to describe the motion of baseballs or hockey pucks or whatever you want, depending what country you're in, Newton's laws will describe them exactly. And no matter what we discover about quantum gravity in the future, if I take a ball here and let it go, it's not going to fall up. And it's motion will be described by Newton's laws. So whenever we describe discover new laws of nature they have to agree with what has already satisfied the test of experiment that's immutable because if it works it'll in to understand experiments now it'll always work to understand experiments and Einstein's the greatness of Einstein was not that he threw out everything that went before him but rather that he showed the two things that were inconsistent with each other but were both the basis of modern physics.
and which had both satisfied the test experiment and therefore each individually had to be true but were both inconsistent. He figured out a way to make them consistent. He didn't throw them out. Now what were the two things that that were the basis of modern physics? The first was from Galileo 400 years earlier. Galileo discovered that you can't tell if you're moving at a constant velocity. There's no experiment you can do that'll tell you that you're moving if you're moving at a constant velocity. If you're if you um if you if you get on a subway train, it's probably or a train if you if you've been at a train station and and you look up and then you suddenly see the train next to you start to move for a second until you either feel the shaking or don't feel the shaking. You don't know whether you're moving or they're moving. Okay? And if there was no shaking, you there's no experiment you could do that would tell you that you were moving or they were moving.
There's just no way you could tell you're moving. If you're in a I flew up here yesterday. If you're in a plane and the wind and the windows are shades are down and it's not shaking. If I throw up a ball, it behaves exactly as it would if I were here and you feel like you're standing still depending upon how much coffee you had beforehand.
But we're not. We're moving around the sun at 30 km/s right now. We're zooming and our sun is moving around the galaxy at 200 km/s right now. So, we're moving very fast, but we act as if we're not because there's no way we can know we're moving as long as as long as we're moving at a constant speed in a constant direction. Okay, that was Galo and that was the basis really that development was the key thing that led to modern physics. Okay, one sec. The other one is Maxwell. Maxwell discovered if I measure the strength of the electric force between two charges, measure the strength of the magnetic force between two two magnets, boom, I determine what the speed of light is. Those two things are inconsistent with each other. Okay?
Now, it may not seem like they're inconsistent. that was part of m of Einstein's you know brains because he was this he realized when he was 16 that they were inconsistent and he and he started to think about it and so I thought of a lot of ways to try and explain this but um I first started to think about this when my when my daughter was very young so I I I come to explain in terms of projectile vomit so let's say I'm draw I was I used to drive my daughter to nursery school when she was young and I would be driving her and let's say I was driving I'll have to change it into kilometers let's say at 30 kilometers per hour um uh you know nice safe speed near the school and so I'd be driving she did not like driving back then she loves it now but she did not she was not comfortable so I'd be driving and let's say she projectile vomits from the back seat hitting me in the back of the head in the front seat okay good now let's say someone here on the ground is watching and they're laughing and they see the projectile vomit. So the projectile vomit, let's say hits me in the when I'm in the car, hit it's going to the back seat to the front seat at say 15 km/h.
Okay? And I'm driving along at 30 km/h.
So in the back seat to the front seat, 15 km/h, but someone over here is watching and they see the car zoom go moving away at 30 km/h and then they see the projectile vomit go from the back seat to the front seat in the car at 15 km/h in the car. So relative to the person on the ground, the projectile vomit is moving at 45. What an amazing audience. 45 kilometers per hour. It's great. You know, I I I was in New York and I was trying to explain this to my publishers. I gave them a lecture and I asked that no one answered and it's cuz they all went to Yale and and uh I used to teach there so I know. But anyway, um okay, good. Now, let's say my daughter is a 21st century child and she has a laser beam. So, she shoots a laser beam and it hits me in the back of the head. Okay? So, the car is moving along 30 km/h. The laser beam is traveling at the speed of light from the back seat to the front seat, hits me in the head.
Person on the ground sees the car moving at 30 km/h and then sees a laser beam at the speed of light in the car. So, the person on the ground sees a laser going at the speed of light in the car plus 30 km/h. Right? Of course not right because it's been banged into your head. But why not right? You see that unfortunately the way we teach in schools is that Einstein said as if it's a Bible as if it really matters. Einstein was driven to the realization that there's something wrong with that picture that what seemed to be true for the projectile vomit cannot be true for light. And it's because it's inconsistent with Galileo.
Because Galileo says there's no experiment I can do on the ground or in the car that tells me one of us is moving.
So if I measure the speed of the light ray to be the speed of light here in the car, but I measure it to be the speed of light 30 km per hour, there's a problem because Maxwell said I determine the speed of light by measuring the strength of the force between two electric charges and between two magnets. I can measure that strength. Those two things I determine the speed of light. But if the person on the ground measures the speed of light to be different, then that must mean the strength of the force between two charges in their laboratory and between two magnets in their laboratory must be different than it would be for the person in the car. Cuz Maxwell told me what the speed of light is. It's based on those two quantities. But the person on the ground can't measure the forces to be different than the person in the car because if they did, they would know that they were standing still and the person in the car was moving. But there's no experiment you can do that tells you who's moving. So therefore, the two observers must see exactly the same thing because the laws of electricity magnetism tell you what the speed of light is. And that's what Einstein realized. The only way to resolve this paradox is somehow if these two observers measure the speed of light to be exactly the same relative to them even though the laser is moving in the car.
And that's why he was driven to that result which gets drumed into people's, you know, in physics classes. And how could that be? How could it be that those two things are the same? It defies common sense. How could you make it happen?
Well, he said, well, look, let's what is what is speed?
Speed is distance traveled in a given time.
Okay, so the only way the two observers could measure the same speed even though the object was moving well relative to one of them is if each observer measures distance and time differently that if distance and time are relative and observer dependent and two observers in relative motion will measure distances and times differently. So Einstein realized the only way to make Maxwell and Galo consistent was that that's the case. Not to throw them out, but to realize that rather the notions of space and time that we held so dear myopically were different. Space and time were absolute. And and and the implications of this, there's three implications. One is that lengths contract. If I'm running across this stage very very fast, say this is 10 cm across for me. If I'm running very fast, respect to you, you'll measure and it'll be say 4 cm.
And now people often get the idea that it's an illusion that you're you perceiving it to be 4 cm. It's not for you. It is 4 cm cuz every measurement you could ever make of this ruler shows is 4 centimeters. And what is length?
Other than something you measure. So it is 10 cm for me and 4 cm for you. It is both at the same time. We're both right and it's not neither of us. Well, both either neither of us or both of us have an illusion because length is something we measure and therefore the reality of what we see depends upon what we measure.
The next implication of that is that things that are simultaneous for me are not simultaneous for you. That means if lightning strikes at either end of the stage at the same time for me, if you're running with respect to me, you will see one event happen before the other. And the last implication is the one that's most used in science fiction is time dilates. If I'm running very fast with respect to you, my clock ticks at a slower rate than yours as far as you can see. And this is of course the basis of much of science fiction, good science fiction and bad science fiction, often in the same show. And uh it's not science fiction. We measure it every day in undergraduate physics laboratories here at UBC and everywhere around the world. In fact, we use it in the very fact that many of you are having cosmic rays go right through your body right now as I speak could only happen because of of of the fact that objects moving very fast have clocks that are ticking slowly. And I don't think I'll explain that. We'll leave that for the question three. But but it's true. So it it it happens every day and we depend upon it.
Okay, great. Those the importance of Einstein's claim was not only did he deduce that this is the only way to make things consistent. But that would not be good enough. Einstein saying it's the case and not be good enough is he made predictions. That's what turns it into science. And at the time he did it that none of the predictions have been tested. But of course, we test them all now and they all work. But I prepared your minds for this because this is the same image I showed you for the walls of the cave. And with hindsight, it's kind of remarkable that Einstein didn't think of this. But his math professor, Herman Mcmanowski, three years later realized that the implication of relativity was something far more profound. And in a paper he wrote in 1908, he um he said, "Henceforth, space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality." Because what he realized is this fact that length is different for different observers really represents the fact that we don't live in a three-dimensional universe. We live in a four-dimensional universe. a four-dimensional universe with three dimensions of space and one dimension of time that are tied together. And what I'm running with respect to you, what I'm essentially seeing is a rotated three-dimensional slice of a four-dimensional universe. The the mathematics is a little more complicated, but essentially I'm seeing a rotated version of a four-dimensional space.
Now, we don't the reason this seems so strange to us is we is the speed of light is so fast.
We often think we don't realize we're actually seeing even threedimensional images. Say I take a picture of everyone here right now. I take a picture. Boom.
I see a two-dimensional image of everyone in the room. But it's not a two-dimensional image. It's a three-dimensional image because the light from the people in the back of the room left their faces before the light from the people in the front of the room. It seems like it's an instant because light travels so fast, but it's not an instant. It's spread out in time as well as being spread out in space.
And when I'm running with respect to you, in some sense, what I'm observing in my universe is a rotated version.
Rotated meaning a it's a little more complicated mathematically, but it's essentially a rotated version of that four-dimensional space. And in that case, one person's space becomes another person's time.
The rod here seems shorter, but remember because of the fact that things aren't simultaneous, a clock here and a clock there are slightly out of sync for you.
One ticks a little bit earlier than the other cuz for you events for me that are simultaneous are not simultaneous for you. So the object is shorter in space, but it's spread out in time.
And just like when I rotate an object, the x component is is is shortened, but the y component is stretched. In this case, objects are shorter in space, but spread out in time. And if you work it out, there's a fourdimensional length called the space-time length that's unambiguous, that's universal, that's constant, that's absolute. Einstein's theory of relativity should have been called the theory of absolutes because there is indeed a four-dimensional length, and it has meaning. But we myopic beings tied to the walls of the cave see these three-dimensional shadows of a four-dimensional reality. And that was the second great unification of the modern era. Space and time which seem so different to us are really different manifestations of precisely the same thing. Okay, great. Now we move on beyond Einstein.
And then this guy came along and that's Richard Fineman and and I'm a big fan of I wrote a book about him and he was one of the greatest physicists of the second half of the 20th century and what he did was he realized well okay so we had relativity we had gravity for Newton and relativity the world seemed fine and then of course in the early parts of the 20th century we discovered quantum mechanics and everything went out the window. Quantum mechanics is crazy. It describes the universe on small scales in a way that defies common sense. And what Fineman and several other people did, a host of other people did, was try and develop a quantum theory of electromagnetism. Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism is beautiful, but it didn't describe the world as small scales where quantum mechanics reigns.
And one there are many interesting properties of quantum mechanics. So I say I like to say quantum mechanics is is kind of like um Wall Street or corporate America. Okay, if you can't see it, anything goes. Okay, as we'll learn, I hope more and more with congressional hearings in my country right now. But and what it really means is that because of something called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, there are fundamental things you cannot know about no matter how good your microscope.
Okay, if I measure a system for only a little while, I can never determine the energy of that system exactly. There's always some uncertainty in the in in your determination, for example. Now, that changed the way we needed to think about electromagnetism. And Fineman developed a beautiful pictorial way of understanding the quantum theory of electromagnetism and something we now call Fman diagrams. This is how we now think of the electric force between two charges. So one charge is here, the electron is here, another electron is there. And what happens is one electron emits this quantum of the electromagnetic field. Light is a wave, but it comes in a stream of particles, wavelike particles called photons. And this electron emits one of these wavelike particles, a photon, and it's absorbed by this electron which gets repelled. Fine. Except this can't happen in the world we observe because an electron just sitting there cannot emit a photon because if an electron is just sitting there and emits a photon and the photon carries away energy where did the energy come from? There's still an electron there afterwards. So the energy isn't conserved. You can't the electron just sitting there cannot emit a photon.
But in the quantum world if you can't see it anything goes. So if if this photon carries a small amount of energy, as long as it disappears in a time scale so short that I can't measure it was there, then it's okay. It's it's it's like embezzlement. Okay? It's okay to take the money out the night before and make money on it before the stock market opens as long as you get it back in in the morning. And that's the way it is in the in the real world. So this photon which you can't see we call a virtual photon cuz it isn't really there. Then you could never do a measurement to see it. But it but that's the way we now think of electromagnetism. This electron emits a virtual photon. That virtual photon is absorbed by this electron before you could ever see it. And boom, it works. And in fact it works so well that this is the best theory in nature.
This is the best scientific theory we have. No theory competes with what this theory called quantum electronamics. You can make predictions based on first principles here and compare them with observations to 14 decimal places.
There's no other place that that that works. Okay, it's the best we got in nature. No theory competes. Now there's another aspect of this theory that's very important and that is the photon has no mass.
Why?
That is important because electromagnetism works across the universe. An electron here repels an electron in alpha centuri.
The elect electric field goes out to infinity. That's only possible because the photon is massless. Cuz remember the Heisenberg uncertainty principle says if I measure this system for a little while I only know the energy to a certain accuracy. But if the photon is massless, then it can carry an arbitrarily small amount of energy.
I can emit a photon with an arbitrarily small amount of energy and that photon could travel all the way from here to alpha centuri and still not violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle before being absorbed. If the particle here had mass then it would carry it would take a lot because E= MC² would have a lot of energy and it couldn't survive all the way there without violating the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. So the fact that electromagnetism is long range is exactly equivalent in the quantum world to the fact that the particle that mediates the electric force is massless.
Okay, everything works. We get the best theory of nature. We got relativity, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, gravity. Everything's okay. But then nature comes along again and we find something absolutely crazy.
First of all, there's a new particle in nature discovered in 1932, the neutron.
But what's worse is the neutron is radioactive. I remember I learned this when I was a kid from a an astronomer named Tommy Gold who was a really amazing lecturer and got me excited about this. It should surprise you that the neutron is radioactive because a neutron is made your bodies are made of atoms and atomic nuclei and the dominant particle in your body is is a neutron.
There more neutrons in your body than protons or electrons. Okay? But if I take a neutron out here and hold it out here, it will decay in about 10 minutes.
Okay? Now, many of you will notice somewhat painfully that you've been here for more than 10 minutes and you're still around. Some of you are praying for your neutrons to decay, perhaps, but they haven't. What gives? Well, a remarkable accident. Here's here's a picture of a neutron. Neutron a neutron decays into three particles. a proton and this is just a fancy way of writing electron and neutrino another neat particle. Now the really surprising thing is that the neutron and the proton weigh almost exactly the same amount.
The neutron is only heavier than the proton by one part in a thousand. So it it has just slightly enough mass. The mass of the neutron is just slightly greater than the mass of the proton, the electron, and the nutrino. Because if it was less than the sum of those masses, it couldn't decay into those particles because energy would have to be conserved. So, it only can decay barely because its mass is almost identical to the sum of those masses, which is why the neutron lasts 10 minutes because in particle physics units, 10 minutes is a hell of a long time. This decay is called a weak decay because it happens so slowly. Okay. Now what happens if I drop a ne neutron in a nucleus? If I drop a neutron in a nucleus, it gets bound in the nucleus. What does it mean to be bound? Some of you know, but um but what it means to be bound is that you lose energy.
Okay, you fall into a nucleus. It takes energy to get out of the nucleus. So the neutron loses energy when it falls in the nucleus. But when it loses energy because of E= MCT ^2, the neutron gets lighter. And in a nucleus, it's too light to decay into these particles. So you're only here because the neutron proton mass difference is so small. Because the reason you're here is because heavy elements can exist. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, helium, all all iron, all the rest of the periodic table would not be here if there were no neutrons.
But the neutron is stable when it's inside of a nucleus because of that accident of our existence. It's just an accident that this because of that not only can stars form carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, all the rest, but they can that those materials can survive in your bodies and we can have this conversation or rather monologue in this case. Okay. Now, this was of some concern because clearly something new was around cuz gravity couldn't cause such a decay and electromagnetism couldn't cause such a decay. So, there had to be a new force in nature. And if there's a new force, you have to try and describe it. The first person to give a theory for that force was this guy here, one of my favorite physicists of the 20th century, Enrico Fairmy, who was the last sort of great nuclear/particle physicist who was equally adapted theory and experiment. Now both fields are in those fields that the the theory is sufficiently complicated and the experiments are sufficiently complicated that no one does both of them to rule.
But he was able to do both of them. And he in fact um um he he actually developed a theory of this um and he submitted it to the journal nature and it got rejected which gives heart to many of us who submitted things to nature and been rejected. And uh but unlike many of us who might try and respond he said forget it. I don't want to do theory anymore. So we went ahead and did experiments after that which was good for him because the next experiment he did won him the Nobel Prize in physics. So it worked for him. But he was he did many things including in the CL in the Manhattan project. He developed the first nuclear reactor as a precursor of development of nuclear bomb. He developed that the first chain control chain reaction in a reactor built at the University of Chicago actually under the football field at the University of Chicago which I always thought was a brilliant thing because then if anything goes wrong you just kill football players and it doesn't really matter. So um so anyway he he uh he went into that but his the model was sort of then it was it was an approximation to a theory but other people worked on it. And the thing about the other thing that's important about science is that it's like Hollywood.
If if it works, you just copy it. And if it works, you just keep copying it like you Halloween 23 or whatever it and so the idea is if we have the best theory in nature, let's copy it. So if there's a new force, let's try and make it look like this force. So we copy it. We draw a similar fine diagram as we call it.
And it's a little more complicated. The neutrons made of particles called quarks, but that doesn't really matter.
It turns into a proton. And then you have electron nutrino come out. And if this force is due to the exchange of a particle, maybe this force is due to the exchange of a particle. But the forces are very different. The weak force operates only inside of a nucleus. The electromagnetic force operates across the whole length of the universe. How can we explain that? Well, if this particle is very massive, you see, then that explains it. Because if it's very massive, as I said, E= MT^2, it has a large mass. So when I emit it, I emit a huge amount of energy.
But if I emit a hu huge amount of energy, the only way I can not violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the only way I won't know that I've emitted a large amount of energy is if this particle decays very quickly.
And if it does that, that means it can't travel very far. So if it's very massive, the force is very short range.
So everything works. You see, we have a massless particle, long range, massive particle, short range. Great. Well, the problem is there's a problem and that is that this theory is the best theory we have in nature. This theory is nonsense.
By nonsense I mean if you take the theory as it stands with a particle there you get infinite answers when you try and do the calculations. Physicists don't like infinities. Mathematicians love them but physicists hate them because it means you can't predict anything. Right? And this was a problem.
And this was a problem that so concerned physicists in the 1960s that in fact a good number of them were willing to give up everything that was known at that point. They said maybe the laws of quantum mechanics and relativity don't apply on the scale of a nucleus.
Maybe we just have to give up this beautiful picture here which works for atoms on the scale of nuclei. Maybe we'll have to think of a whole new framework for physics. Give up particles. There was a zen-like theory developed, of course, in Berkeley in the 60s. Um, the sound of one particle clapping. Basically, it it it it it said that all particles were made of all other particles and and and eventually that morphed into something called string theory, which was tried to explain things and failed miserably as it still has today in a different context. But but people gave up on this beautiful picture. And the amazing thing, you know, when I wrote this story, Physicists, I'll let you in a secret. Physicists are people. And that means they're pigheaded and they have biases and they don't want to change their minds. And that's okay because the science, the science overcomes that. The process of science, the skeptical questioning, the insistence on testing, empirical evidence, all of that overcomes and drags physicists kicking and screaming eventually to the right answer. But there are times maybe when you read my book if you read it when I was writing that you just want to shake these people because they actually had the answer in the 60s they just didn't know they had the answer because they were too busy thinking in a certain direction and there hanging out here was exactly the right answer and they just didn't see it and the right answer came from a different area of physics superconductivity in 1911 this guy came on a Dutch physicist discovered if I took mercury and I cooled it down to four degrees above absolute zero something very strange would happen the resistance would go exactly to zero not become small but go exactly to zero and what does that mean well if I take a a loop of mercury wire when it's cold I can turn make it a wire and I and I connect it to a battery and I get a current going and then I cool it down below 4° and I take the battery away the current will keep flowing but it won't flow for just an hour or a day, it'll flow forever. It'll never stop because there's absolutely zero electrical resistance. And this is remarkable. And on it's called a superc conductivity, a good word for that. And it is a remarkable fact. It took it it it took 50 years for the proper theoretical understanding of this due to the complicated interactions of electrons and the lattice of of mercury and other materials. And it's was really one of the great developments of of of 20th century physics to explain superc conductivity or that kind of superc conductivity. But nowadays we have superconductors that are actually go superconducting at much higher temperatures. So we can actually do fun experiments in high school classes like this. You can we have superconductors that'll become superconducting at liquid at at uh liquid uh not liquid nitrogen dry ice temperatures.
And we put a superconductor in dry ice.
And then if you take a magnet and put it near the superconductor, the magnet will float. It's a fun little experiment you can do. Some of you may had have had done for you in high school class or university. It's neat. Now, why is that?
That's because a in a superconductor, the superconductor doesn't allow magnetic fields to permeate the superconductor. They die off at the surface of the superconductor. It basically repels magnetic field lines.
So, magnetic field lines can't can't permeate the superconductor. So they basically get repelled and that magnetic field repulsion produces a force that causes that magnet to levitate. And the same would be true essentially if I had electric charge here too. Electric forces can't permeate the superconductor.
Okay, fine. What does this have to do with anything I've been talking about?
Well, let's imagine that you lived inside the superconductor.
What would you and developed laws of physics? What would your laws of physics be? Well, if you lived inside a superconductor, you would find that electricity and magnetism were short-range forces. Cuz if I had a magnetic field, it would die off very quickly. If I had electric field, it would die off very quickly. And you would develop quantum mechanics for the and you would discover when you develop the theory of that short range force that in quantum mechanics that you would find that there'd be a particle that would convey that force that that particle would have to be massive.
And indeed inside a superconductor photons are massive.
Inside a superconductor photons have a mass and therefore if you were born and lived and died inside a superconductor for you photons would be massive particles.
Now all this was known and it should have rung a bell for the physicists who were thinking along the lines they were thinking but they didn't. But then eventually the idea came out maybe we live in a vast cosmic superconductor of sorts.
And if that's the case then what what what what happens? Well it's like it's like you're swimming. So the nice pool at UBC I was looking at it today and the new pool buildings being built I guess.
And if you're swimming in a pool you you can swim very fast and feel light and everything else. But if I fill up the pool with molasses first thing is you don't want to go swimming.
But secondly, if you tried to swim in the molasses, you'd swim much more slowly. You'd feel much heavier. So imagine now that there's a vast invisible field everywhere in nature.
And some particles interact with that field.
And as they're moving, they experience a force, force of resistance that causes those particles to slow down and act like they're massive.
and particles that interact with that field more strongly act like they're more massive.
In that case, the mass of those particles is really an illusion.
Just like the mass of the photon in some sense in a superconductor is an illusion. And if that's the case, you can imagine then a new unification in physics. You can imagine here's that Fman diagram I showed you turned upside down. Now this is the electric force between two charged objects. And here's that here's that force of the neutron changing into a proton basically and producing electronutrino.
These all look the same. But if these particles are exactly massless just like this particle, the mathematics suddenly become sensible. And you could say, well, let's imagine that these particles that convey the weak force interact with this background field and act like they're massive. But at a fundamental level, they have no mass at all. And the mathematics of this is identical to the mathematics of this. In fact, if that's the case, these two things don't look different at all.
And in that sense, if that's true, the weak force, which looks so different than the electric force, is really the same thing. The electric the electromagnetic force and the weak force become two different aspects of precisely the same thing. something we now call the electroeak force.
And the reason they look so different is that is an accident of our circumstances. There happens to be an invisible field everywhere in nature and these particles interact with it. We live in a vast cosmic superconductor and these particles get appear to have mass.
This one doesn't interact with it. It remains massless and in our world those two forces look very different.
Now this is a remarkable story but up to this point it sounds religious. I mean what did I say? I said there's a vast invisible force everywhere in nature that's responsible for our existence.
Okay sound like or Star Wars or something. And if if that were it that would be religion. Okay. But this is physics and you can't make a claim like that and just let it go.
If there's an invisible field everywhere in nature, we got to find it. And so the question comes, how can you find this field? And the answer is cosmic sedom masochism.
We spanked the vacuum.
We spank it hard.
Someone got excited by that. Anyway, um what do I mean by that? Well, in qu in the quantum world, every field is associated with a particle.
And if I take enough energy and I dump it into a single point in space, maybe there's enough energy to kick out real particles associated with that field.
Let me call that field the Higs field.
And if I can somehow amass enough energy and dump it into a point in space at a single point, maybe I can kick out real particles associated with that field. If it's there, I must be able to kick out those particles. and I will call those hicks particles.
So the idea is to figure out a way to dump enough energy into space at a single point. How do you do that? You build the most complicated machines humans have ever built.
The large hatron collider in Geneva. You build the largest particle accelerator on Earth. Here's Geneva. You can't see very well in this image, but there's Lake Geneva over there. There's the airport which if you fly into Geneva, land in the airport, you see beautiful countryside around you, but 100 meters under the countryside is a tunnel that's 26 km around.
And what we do is we accelerate protons in this direction at 99.999998% the speed of light in this direction.
And then we accelerate protons at 99.9999998% the speed of light in that direction and collide them in a few places. says they go around thousands of times every second. Here's the French Swiss border right there. So, they go through the border thousands of times every second without passports or anything, which I think Mr. Trump is wants to change. But but they collide and the idea is if you make them collide in a small enough region, maybe maybe you'll produce enough energy to produce these six particles. And in the United States, they celebrate this anacronistic holiday on July 4th, which has no meaning anywhere else except now it does because on July 4th, 2012, the large rock collider, we announced that 50 events have been observed out of the billions and billions of collisions in that machine. And those events looked like Higs particles. They quacked like Higs particles. They walked like Higs particles. And if they do that, maybe they're Higs particles. And since the intervening 5 years, all the experiments have shown that these particles have precisely the properties you would imagine of a particle that's associated with an invisible field throughout nature. We discovered the Higs particle.
I was shocked. I didn't believe I I was fully I was sure the Higsfield didn't exist myself because I just thought it was kind of too slippery and slimy an explanation that nature would be more imaginative in some ways than that. But to my amazement, in fact, that field is really there. We really do live in a cosmic superconductor. And the particles that make us up, they have mass because they interact with that background field. And if that background field wasn't there, we wouldn't be there because all the particles that make us up essentially would have be massless.
The for the weak force, the electromagnetic force would look identical and everything we see would not be here.
Now this story is humanity at its best. I would argue the story of the development of the standard model of particle physics of understanding how on a fundamental scale nature looks so different than the world we experience is humanity at its best because it's people bravely going where not only where no one had gone before but where they didn't want to go.
nature took us kicking and screaming to get there to see that the universe of our existence is vastly different than than the universe we experience uncomfortably so that as I'll describe and and emphasize in a moment that is the way it is because of an accident that that the universe that seems to be designed for us so efficiently is not designed for us at all at a fundamental scale we couldn't even exist in it but it's more than just that so these people were willing to go where the nature took them. But then we were willing to build over 50 years this machine, this vast billion10 billion machine just to measure this thing and just to find out why we're here, not to make a better poster or anything like that. And you know, one of the one of the problems of science in a way, it's not a problem, it's a benefit, but one of the paradoxical aspects of science is that it produces technology like the technology that allowed us to be here today. But that means that people when they when you talk about science or scientific discovery, they always say, "What good is it? What will it do for me? Will it make a better toaster, a faster car? What what we never ask that when it comes to a Shakespeare play or a Moar concerto or a Picasso painting?"
Okay, that's but it seems to me that they're exactly the same. that the power of science, the beauty of science is not the technology it produces, but the fact that it changes our perspective of our place in the cosmos, forcing us to reassess ourselves, where we come from, and how we got here. And these machines that we built, I would argue, are like the Gothic cathedrals of the 21st century. The Gothic cathedrals, after all, were built by thousands of artisans from many different countries over centuries using the most sophisticated technology of the time. had to figure out how to keep these these roofs up and many times they fell down until they got it right. The Large Hadron Collider was built by 10,000 PhD scientists from over a 100 different countries working for over two decades speaking many different languages, many different religions. None of that mattered. They all came together because science could bring people together. That's humanity at best.
Religion put pushes people apart.
Science brings people together. And these machines are amazing. If you go there, you feel like Goliver in one way.
There's a This is one of the machines called the Atlas detector. It's a larger of the two. The There's a smaller one called the compact muon solenoid, which has as much metal in it as the um Eiffel Tower. Not very compact, but it's amazing to go there if you're if you can go there when the machine's not running.
I have a better picture here. Uh yeah, cuz I'm in it. There it is. and and and and um it's amazing to see these machines and you I have a whole chapter in the book on the on the large shadow glider because you cannot speak about it with hyperbole because everything about it is as hyperbolic as it sounds is true. There's so many aspects of it that make it seem so impossible to build. For example, every second at the large adin collider enough data is generated to fill more than a thousand 1 TBTE hard drives. more than the information in all the world's libraries. Every second the tunnel, the 26 km long tunnel has to be evacuated with a vacuum that's sparser than the vacuum of space outside the International Space Station.
Everything about this is amazing. We built it just to answer this question essentially. How do we get here?
And the other thing that's great is that we're not done. The best part of the title of my book is the so far part.
Because the greatest story ever told so far is the greatest story ever told so far.
Unlike that other greatest story ever told, which remained exactly the same as it was when it was first proposed by ignorant peasants before who didn't know the Earth orbited the Sun.
this story changes and it gets better.
It'll be better tomorrow than it is today. I'm I'm a big fan of art and one of my favorite periods is impressionist art. And um I like impressionist paintings because they look great from a distance, but you walk up close to them and they get really crappy because that's the way physics is because the standard model is great. It explains every experiment we've ever been able to me do. But there are a host of questions that it brings up.
Why is the Higs field there? Why in the early history of the universe did some field settle, freeze literally into some configuration in empty space so that the weak force would be weak and the electromagnetic force would be long range? Why did that happen? Why did it happen at the scale that happened? All these questions, every time we make a new discovery in physics, there are more questions than answers.
And that's great because that means there are new things to be discovered.
and some young people in the audience today may discover them all those and then that'll breed new questions.
I don't know if there'll ever be a theory of everything. I doubt it frankly. But it doesn't matter either way. It just it doesn't matter if nature is an infinite onion. We peel back leachch layer because tomorrow we'll understand more than we did today. And we won't understand it because the universe is the way wanted it we wanted it to be. We'll understand it because we're willing to allow ourselves to accept the universe for the way it is.
And that is what's remarkable about the human experience of science. And that's what worries me too.
First of all, the good thing is our existence is a cosmic accident. And by that I mean it's exactly like that picture I showed earlier.
These people think this direction is special, ordained by God, meaningful. The force in this direction is different than the force in THAT DIRECTION. ALL AN ACCIDENT.
If they lived in this icicle, a different direction would be important.
And as I say, physicists might eventually discover on this icicle that that's just an accidental existence.
That there could be ice crystals pointing in different directions.
There's nothing special about that direction. They might discover that at say 4 in the morning. And then at 8 in the morning, the sun could rise. It could heat up and icy could disappear.
And then of course the nice rotational symmetry of nature would reappear again because there'd be no special direction. But it wouldn't matter because those people would disappear because they could only exist on the icicle. And that may be our universe.
Because it turns out if you look at the Higsfield and you look at its properties, it may melt.
It's just on the hairy edge of being unstable given the measurement of the Higs parameters that we have. And it looks like it's probably stable, but it's on the hairy edge of being unstable. And if that Higsfield melts, everywhere in nature, if that Higsfield goes away, we go away. Everything we know, the stars, the galaxies, the planets, the aliens, everything in the universe that we that makes the universe that we know and love that seem so awesome in our pictures goes away.
We our our existence is no more significant than that crystal on the window and the future could be miserable. Don't worry about this by the way if it's it I don't want you to get scared by this um because even if it were unstable the calculations you would perform show that universe the big field isn't going to decay tomorrow or next year or a billion years from now or a billion years from now or a billion billion years from now or a billion billion billion years from now. the decay time is extremely long even if we're unstable. So [snorts] it's this is an academic issue not not one that's well it's keep your diamonds and all the rest but but it does mean that in the far future the universe could be quite different that we are here at a very special time in that sense that our existence is just not only a cosmic accident in space but a cosmic accident in time and the universe is no more designed for us than Bees are designed to see the color of flowers.
If they didn't, they wouldn't reproduce.
The universe isn't designed for us. It's not fine-tuned for us. We're fine-tuned for the universe. The universe has these properties allowing us to exist. And this illusion of design is what I want to end with. I want to talk a little bit about this illusion of design because it's so important and urgent now in many places throughout this country and the United States and around the world. The notion that somehow everything was designed so we could be here. Design is a very subjective thing.
Take these Christmas ornaments. They're clearly [snorts] designed for because they look so beautiful. But of course, they're not Christmas ornaments. They're ice crystals. They're they're snowflakes.
And all you need for make a snowflake is a polar molecule like water and you cool it down and and given the I think 57 degree angles of the polar molecule you will create beautiful crystal structures. So snowflakes aren't designic. Okay. But you say well okay that's one thing but let me think of something that's clearly designed like this building architecture. Architecture clearly gives evidence of intelligence.
So let's take say the Buckminister Fuller. When I was growing up it was a big deal. All the hippies had one in their backyard and did neat things in them and stuff and and it was clearly evidence of intelligence. But of course, if you take soot, you'll find a molecule called carbon 60 which appears spontaneously in soot which is a buckminister fuller. It's now called buckminister ferine. Nothing is less designed than soot. Okay. So we have to be very careful when we say something's designed. We have to be skeptical. We have to question ourselves. And really the first person to really point that out was one of the greatest scientists of all time, Charles Darwin, who did so in the context of life. Life appears to be designed. But what what he showed was that it's not. It's not. The universe isn't fine-tuned for life. Life is fine-tuned for the universe. And in in one of the most beautiful paragraphs in all of scientific literature, the end of the origin of the species, he writes, "There is grandeur in this view of life with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one. And that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved." It's a beautiful statement of the diversity of life coming from a simple beginning. But it's true for science and for the physics as well. As the universe has gone on, these amazing forms have evolved from stars to galaxies to people from so simple a beginning in which the forces of nature the one the weak electromagnetic force are really the same. All particles are masses. The same simple beginning due to the evolution of the universe and this huge field forming incredible diversity has resulted all the diversity of the stars and galaxies and forces and life.
But also we have to remember that scientists are products of their time.
And in a letter to Hooker in 1863 he said it's mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life. One might as well think of the origin of matter.
I get paid now to think about the origin of matter. In 1863 it was rubbish. But the story's gotten better. And the origin of matter in fact is partly the story of the origin in the Higsfield that I told you about. And so the things that today seem ridiculous, people often say, "Science will never explain this."
You pick in your you pick your thing. I get told all the time, "Science, you scientists, you think you're you'll never explain X." When you think about that, that's such a the conceit in that claim is made because if you know, we'll never explain X, then you must understand X.
Okay? And we don't know what the limits of science are until we try. And so far, we haven't seen any limits. Maybe there are. We don't know.
But I'm worried especially in my country right now because it used to happen in your country. You had this prime minister before the current ones and um and and and and uh and you know in the United States now they're cutting the budget for all this research that I talk about here particle physics. They're cutting the Department of Energy, which is the chief funding agency for all physical science in the United States, by 20% in the budget.
They're cutting the budget for completely for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, for the um uh for the Institute of Museums and Libraries, for the National Endowments for the Arts, for the National Endowments for the Humanities, cut to zero in the current proposed budget. And and that if you work it out, that saves $1.82 billion. I added it up. Okay. In the same budget, there's a line item of $2 billion, which is the first installment of a wall with Mexico. That's because it's too big to build one of Canada. I guess Canadians may want to build one soon, believe me.
But uh but I think of that this wall being built to hold out these invisible hordes at the expense of getting rid of arts, humanity, science and and and to me the best sort of discussion of that and the stupidness of that the stupidity of that came from a particle physicist Robert Wilson who was a director of the first large well one of the the the largest particle accelerator in in the world until Fermy Lab that I until the large adron collider the Fermy National Accelerator Laboratory in the 1960s when it being built. He was asked by Congress, will it aid in the defense of the nation? And here was his answer.
No sir, I don't believe so. It is only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of man, our love of culture. It has to do with are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets. I mean, all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.
And that we have to remember when we're presented with people who would rather build walls, build defenses than support science, the humanities, and the arts. Because the things that make that country great or this country great or any country great are not the walls it builds, but the legacy it leaves for the future. The understanding of ourselves which increases with time.
Those are the things we remember. Those are the things that matter and those are the things we have to preserve and be brave enough about. So I began my You can applaud that. That's fine. I don't mind. [applause] I I want to end I began I book with this quote from from Virgil. One of my favorite quotes from the These are the tears of things. The stuff of mortality cuts us to the heart which I used to be able to say in Latin.
But the next line in the ina is not as wellknown but to me it's the most more important line because it it is release your fear and to me that's what's important. We have to stop being afraid of the unknown. Stop being afraid of people from different places. Stop being afraid of a universe which may not be the universe we want to live in.
It doesn't matter. We have to force our beliefs to conform to the evidence of reality. And we do so, the world becomes more awesome, not less. And to do so, we have to let the world and nature tell us how it behaves. And rather than bemoan a miserable future or a universe that wasn't created for us, we should instead, if this changed, enjoy your brief moment in the sun. Thank you very much.
[applause] Thank you.
[applause] Thank you.
Thank you.
[applause] You're just getting away from the question [applause] period. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate Thank you very much.
Thank you. I I do appreciate that tremendously. We're gonna have a question period now and and I guess there are two microphones and I won't take too many questions in public because people have to pee. But um but but I will take some and then I'm going to be out there signing books. But you know it doesn't matter if you have a book, okay? If you have a question, I'm happy to answer. I won't leave till the last question is answered. So don't worry about that or the heaven forbid the last selfie is taken. But but but um but uh but for the moment, if you have some questions, I be brave because other people probably have the same questions.
So go to one microphone or the other if you have any questions. Oh, good.
Somebody Oh, good. Okay, excellent.
We're getting some. This microphone seems to be more questionable. Yeah.
Good evening, Lawrence. Thank Thanks for coming. Thank you, the organizers for uh putting this together. Wonder if you could take a moment maybe talk to us about um any thoughts on consciousness and awareness. Um how uh why >> Sure.
>> And maybe are we done evolving in in that sense? Well, the answer is I have absolutely nothing to say about consciousness or awareness because I tell people don't believe me. I do physics because it's easy. Okay? Because it's the easy stuff. It's a low hanging fruit. Consciousness is much more complicated. It's a much more complicated issue and and I often like to say there are many more books written about consciousness because we understand so little about it. I mean in quantum mechanics you just write one book and there it is. and uh uh because we understand quantum mechanics but consciousness is very very complicated and it's going to take a long time to understand it. In fact, it's not clear do we even have a good definition of consciousness. So, so it's a it's it's clearly a fascinating area and and we're learning about the brain leaps and brown whole new things about the brain and it it's an exciting new area of science that's coming along now and physics came along earlier and so physics literally is easy. Consciousness will take a while. I do I think some people say we'll never understand consciousness again. That's ludicrous as far as I can tell and most people I know I run an institute in at at Arizona called the Origins Project and we we've run meetings on pattern processing in human brain and on artificial intelligence and as far as I can see there's no distinction between us at a fundamental level and computers. So, so I I think we are just a form of computer, probably a different architecture, but but I don't know anything about it. And if any physicist gives a lecture about consciousness, don't go to it.
>> Yeah. Okay.
>> Uh in your work, how do you find or choose good problems to to solve?
>> Oh, that's a really good question. You know, it's a matter it's a it's a really the art of that question. In fact, that I'll answer your question, but I want to describe it more generally because one of my big problems with the way science is taught in schools is it's taught as a series of facts.
And then of course you can have alternative facts. Okay? And and but that's not what science is. Science is a process for discovering facts. And how do you get to that process? By questioning. And the way we should teach science is is a series of questions, not a series of answers. The answers aren't important. I have more information in my in my phone than in in a high school like was when I grew up. But of course, there's more misinformation, too. And what we have to teach students is how to tell the difference between them. Myth information and misinformation. That what will determine whether who whether people are viable, productive citizens in the 21st and 22nd century is how they can tell nonsense from sense. And by doing that only by learning how to ask questions and then going about to see about how to answer them. And we answer them by that skeptical inquiry, testing, retesting, working on empirical evidence and going back and always being skeptical of ourselves. So the process of learning what the right questions to ask comes like all things like learning how to play a violin by practice. And one of the reasons we subject these problem sets on physics students besides to torture premedical students is is because that process of problem solving builds some kind of intuition that hopefully will help guide you when you come to ask questions about the real world. So there's no tried and fast rule for how to do how to pick problems and and some people are better than others. But if once you know where things are, the the questions become clearer. People write me all the time, not just the people claim I'm wrong, but write me with their theories of nature. And the problem is they they just don't know what our current theories are. And therefore, they don't have the right questions. And so it's a lot of intellectual baggage and it's a process. And and then it's an art. And what's interesting if you look at the history of science is that the questions people ask the great physicists they asked the right questions but only for a little while.
You know Einstein asked the right questions but eventually he got out of touch and his questions weren't interesting anymore. And so for all of us we're very very lucky if at any point in our life we ask a question that touches at the heart of nature. And if that happens to any of us at any time in our lives we feel very lucky. But there's no there's no rule for how to determine the good questions except practice. Just like how to become a good violinist or artist or or musician or or writer, you know, I write and the way I learned how to write was to write and and so it's just that keep asking questions. I say to parents and teachers, particularly parents, the best thing you can say to your kids when they ask you a question is I don't know.
We all want to have the answers but I don't know is so important because then you can say let's figure out how how to find out the answer and in schools it becomes a process of discovery instead of a process of memorization. So that was a big long migill as we like to say as an answer to your little question but it's a good one. Thank you.
>> Okay. Yeah.
>> Um hi Lawrence. Thanks for the talk and also uh thanks for making the tickets really affordable. Um >> I didn't but that's good. I'm glad they were. Thank you.
>> If I had my way they probably would have been a lot more expensive but anyway.
Well, I bought your book, so you're not getting any more money from me. No. Um, >> I was just wondering based on our current understanding of science, do you think we can definitively say one way or another whether the universe is deterministic or not? And if we can't, what's your inkling?
>> Well, I I think we given the science we know, I think we can say pretty definitively that the universe is deterministic.
Quantum mechanics, you know, is seems to be the great out. I have I was going to say my friend, but he's not. I like to make him mad. Deep back chopra. Um it it it's really easy to make him mad.
I do all the time. But um you know these people rely on quantum mechanics as this weird thing that allows everything to be possible. And quantum mechanics of course is probabilistic, right? You measure things, you don't know the exact answer, but it measurements give you a range of answers. But the theory is probabilistic. Quantum mechanics is based on second order differential equations which and by that it means if you provide an initial value for what's called the wave function then it's that wave function is completely determined for all the rest of future history. So the wave function in quantum mechanics is determined. Now when you measure it the results are are probabilistic but the probabilities are completely determined. So at a fundamental level the laws of physics are deterministic but that doesn't change the fact that on the scale in which we live where interactions are so complicated and so many things are come into determination of almost anything the world effectively acts as if it's not deterministic.
We act we the world we act as if we have free will because effectively we live in a world in which effectively it's indistinguishable from a world in which we had free will. It may be that I had no choice in what I had to say now, but the there's so many factors that go into that that that I I might as well act as if I did. We may as well take responsibility for the actions we make.
So the resolution of this complicated philosophical issue in my mind is quite simple. The world is deterministic, but we act we the world effectively the scales we live is indistinguishable from a world in which there's free will. And I can live with that.
>> Yeah.
>> Thanks. Yes. Hi, thank you for being here today.
>> Thank you for being here today.
>> So, I was wondering um what your take on the more exotic explanation um that the cold spot on the cosmic microwave background um is a signature of a collision with another public universe.
>> Yeah. Okay. Um it's a good question. Um, so there are anomalies in all observations to the forefront and those anomalies are almost always wrong or at least there are there are inclinations to assume significance to things that aren't necessarily significant. The cosmic microwave background um is um is this background coming from the big bang that's largely uniform in all directions. It's got small fluctuations in it and those fluctuations are fluctuations in temperature at the part of one at the level of one part in 100,000. It's amazing we've been able to measure them and they represent small perturbations which are essentially put in at the beginning of time. Now you can describe those fluctuations because they're due to quantum mechanics statistically.
And when you do that, you can look at the microwave background and the statistics of the microwave background are largely exactly what you'd predict from statistics. Okay. But then there are certain anomalies and the question is when you see something is it a sign it does it imply new physics or is it just an accident? Okay.
And so if I see a a 7 foot tall person in this room, I can ask are they different species or are they the tail of a distribution?
Okay. And the problem is let me put it a different way. Let's say LeBron James and I were sharing the stage, okay? And let's say the building collapsed, okay?
and all the rest of you were never found.
[laughter] But but they found the skeletons of me and LeBron James and they were the only humans that that these aliens ever saw.
They'd look at my skeleton. They'd look at LeBron James skeleton and the tendency would just be able to say these are two different species.
Okay, if you only have a sample of one or two, how do you know if you're seeing the tail of a distribution or two different species? Now, if the cosmic wave background, as we have every reason to believe, is due to quantum mechanical configurations in the early history of the universe, then if you have many different universes, you'll have many different configurations.
And in some of them, there'll be deviations. at one point were called two sigma deviations, unusual ones. Okay, if you measure enough universes, you'll see that it's uniform. But if you measure one and you see some weird deviation, is it significant?
Okay, and the answer generally is to assume it's not, unless there's compelling evidence that it is. And so there is there's an anomalous cold spot in that distribution. And you can work out the likelihood that it would be there. And the likelihood, I'd forget the number, but it's probably around 1% some 1 one to 5%. So there's a 1% likelihood that fluctuations would produce that. But 1% is a lot.
And in in, you know, in medicine, a 99% confidence in something is enough to win a Nobel Prize. In physics, it's not. You need a 99.999995% confidence. So when we see something that happened in one of a 100 universes, maybe we're just one of those 100 universes. So the assumption is that the best assumption that I know of is that it's not significant. Some people have claimed that maybe it's giving us evidence of another universe, but to me that extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence and that certainly isn't extraordinary evidence.
And and um and I do think we actually could develop evidence of other universes, and I've written about it, but I don't think that is That's so that's my guess but right now it's just a guess and unfortunately we live in just one universe or most of us do. The Republican party in my country lives in another one but but but that's a different thing but thank you for that question. Yeah >> thank you so much. Um we understand now that we live in that superconductor right we live what >> in a superc conductor.
>> Mhm. Um, do we understand where is the source of this superconductor or is is there a way for us to ever Well, we we understand that the source of that superconductor is this weird field, the Higs field that that that froze. Just like the electrons freeze in a superconductor in a very special configuration making it a superconductor. The Higs field forms what's called a Bose Einstein condensate in the early history of the universe. So we understand exactly where the super duct come from except we don't know why the Higsfield froze in our model it freezes but what determined the physics for that model of the Higsfield what determined the fundamental physics of the Higsfield that's still an open question we think we have potential answers to that question which is why the harcharad collider is not turned off it's still running it's going to run for 15 or 20 years and we think that one of the explanations for why it froze the way it is is that there are other there's new phenomena in nature that result in that may be a whole new symmetry of nature that produces a whole new set of particles called super symmetric particles and we think we may discover them with the large collider that's the best bet but maybe it's wrong but we don't know the answer and I'm happy to say I don't know the answer but the good news is we're trying to find out thank you yeah I'm going to take I hate to do this to you um but I'm going to take your question and then I'm going to take your question from the young man and that's it. Okay. I'm sorry, but I I think people, you know, then I'll be happy to answer the questions later.
Okay. Yeah.
>> Well, now you're making me want to >> These better be damn good questions.
>> No uh no pressure. I come to you as uh the nonscientist nerd, geek, lover of atheism, lover of humanity, >> all good things, >> all the amazing things, the important things in life besides [snorts] science.
Have you and the gang Richard and Neil, have you guys just ever thought of stepping into >> politics?
>> Politics and world government and like you know all these scientists from the the collider like we need to stop.
>> Yeah. No, no, thank you. I I think I think um >> all of this that's going on.
>> No, I thought of it. I'm very political.
I'm I can't help but be political. I I I've always been that way. And and and um and and politics occupies far too much of my thinking. I wish it didn't. Uh but it does. Um and so I've thought at times of of of running for politics and um uh Neil Neil wouldn't because it would be too big a pay cut at the very least for him. But um but um uh um and and and my my decision at various times I I've come close and I haven't for two reasons. One is I promised my wife I wouldn't but that was a different thing. But but more importantly um first I think I can have more of an impact doing what I do. I'm fortunate enough to have some kind of impact and I have an audience and I can I can write and I can speak and some people listen.
So that's important. But also the process of being a politician wouldn't be a compromise for me because if I wanted to be elected, I thought of running purposely to lose. That's just to get the voice just to get a voice. I almost did in Arizona when John McCain um didn't have an opponent at one point.
I thought, "Wow, he'd be running for president and there'll be a lot of attention paid to a Senate race and and and um and so I thought of running with the purpose of losing." Um but to win would just require too much of a compromise. I could not say what I really meant and and I just don't think I I could as a politician. You have to you have to compromise too much and I'm not interested in compromising.
>> What?
>> We've already won. All we need to do is get together.
>> Well, I mean, yeah. Well, it'd be great.
It'd be great if I could if if if we had a world where you could say what you mean and um and and win. And I think we'll only have such a world when we educate people to be skeptical, questioning, and be willing to open their minds. And and that's not the world we live in now. So I'd rather devote my energies to try and develop the former rather than the latter. But it is important that there be some scientists in government just like like it's important that but I don't think you see the point the value of science is not to determine policy. The value of science is to provide the evidence that allows you to make sound policy. And so if we we don't need scientists in government if they're willing to accept the results of empirical evidence in making policies and using reason. So I don't think a a government of scientists would necessarily be any better than a government of lawyers. Well, anything would be better than a company of lawyers, but but so so look, I have a friend who's a congressman, Bill Foster, and there's only one got PhD physicists in the entire Cong 535 people, only one PhD. It would be nice to have more empirically based. They're a bunch of doctors, but as I learned when when my I have a friend here who knew, you know, I wanted to be a doctor when I was younger. My mother wanted me to be a doctor desperately for a long time. And um and then she made this mistake of telling me that doctors were scientists and I became a scientist and I realized that doctors aren't necessarily some doctors are but um but you know take that idiot who's running health and human or whatever his name is running uh what is he running now? Ben Ben Carson I try to forget his name every day. He's example of the fact that doctors don't need to be scientists. He's anti-science. So but anyway that's my personal decision. But I I'm happy to say that I know of now a few scientists who are running for Congress and that's great. But but people from all walks of life should run because it should be representative.
Democracy is supposed to be representative of the population and and um but it doesn't matter what your background is. What really matters is whether you're willing to base policies on reality or on bias and prejudice. And if you're willing to base it on reality, I don't care what your background is.
Last question, young man.
If I couldn't solve a question, what advice would you give me so I wouldn't get um discouraged about not being able to solve that question?
>> Oh, what a great question.
[applause] Well, that's very good.
>> Well, you know, life is full of questions we can't solve. Exactly. In fact, one of the greatest disservices we do to students like you, and this will happen throughout your career, which I'm sure will be wonderful on, is that we we give students these questions that they can always solve, or they're always supposed to be able to solve anyway. And it gives them the illusion that all problems are solvable. But the minute you get on the real world, whether you're a scientist or or anything, you find that questions aren't exactly solvable. And the trick becomes how to take a question that you can't solve and turn it into a question you can.
And that's the exciting thing because often there's a reason you can't solve that problem. And if you understand the reason why you can't solve that problem, you can turn into a problem you can solve. And then you can get the satisfaction of moving in a new direction. So every brick wall you encounter can be walked around. And just remember that that there's nothing that stops you from eventually going around it to find the answer. And ultimately the key thing to remember when it comes to brick walls and the people who provide brick walls for you, the only advice I give to young people when they ask me, you know, what's your advice?
I'm a young physicist. My advice is always the same. Don't let the bastards get you down. Thank you. Thank you.
[applause] Thank you very much.
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